First Steps with OpenELEC on the Raspberry Pi 2
OpenELEC uses very little system resources for processor or memory. There's no need to use any special customization tips to get good performance with the RPi2. There's also no need to overclock the machine, reduce the resolution of videos, or use a different skin (although I really like the Amber skin).

Mandriva Linux, formerly known as Mandrake Linux, is a friendly Linux Operating System which specializes in ease-of-use for both servers and the home/office. It is freely available in many languages throughout the world. The Mandriva Linux PowerPack contains more than 2300 high-quality applications including a complete Office Suite of programs, plus installation support, for a cost of approximately 10 times less than the equivalent Microsoft Windows + MS Office cost, which comes without any technical support. Read more

Gnome Partition Editor uses libparted to detect and manipulate devices and partitiontables while several (optional) filesystemtools provide support for filesystems not included in libparted. Read morehot

GRand Unified Bootloader - an attempt to produce a bootloader for IBM PC-compatible machines that has both the capability to be friendly to beginning or otherwise non-technically interested users and the flexibility to help experts in diverse environments hot

a small program to enumerate all the PCI and USB devices in a system, check if the device is supported by the kernel and automatically load necessary modules for this devices. Must be used in small embedded systems with less disk space

BG-Tiny Linux Bootdisk is a Linux bootdisk that does not use a ramdisk, so it will run on computers with very little RAM. It is basically a somewhat extended fork of Tiny Linux Bootdisk. It is based on Linux 2.4 series, uClibc, and BusyBox. It includes dosfsprogs, e2fsprogs, gpart, lilo, and ms-sys. Supported filesystems are ext2, ext3, iso9660, tmpfs, and vfat.

a daemon control daemon. It can be used as a faster and more flexible replacement for init, or by itself. It has the ability to track complex dependencies, and allows package management systems to easily add and maintain them.

DBAN is a self-contained boot floppy that securely wipes the hard disks of most computers. DBAN will automatically and completely delete the contents of any hard disk that it can detect, which makes it an appropriate utility for bulk or emergency data destruction. Read more

The purpose of the DiskDrake project is to simplify hard disk partitioning. DiskDrake is graphical, simple and powerful, and licensed under the GPL (GNU General Public License). Two skill levels are available (newbie, expert). It's written entirely in Perl and Perl/Gtk.

Etherboot is a software package for creating ROM images that can download code over an Ethernet network to be executed on an x86 computer. Many network adapters have a socket where a ROM chip can be installed. Etherboot is code that can be put in such a ROM. Etherboot is normally used for for booting PCs diskless.

GNU ext2resize is a package which allows resizing ext2 and ext3 filesystems (both shrinking and growing). The ext2resize tool is for resizing unmounted filesystems, and ext2online is for growing a mounted filesystem (it needs a kernel patch to work, however).

a tool which tries to guess the primary partition table of a PC-type hard disk in case the primary partition table in sector 0 is damaged, incorrect or deleted. The guessed table can be written to a file or device

Grime is a Gtk+ based front-end for configuring the appearence of GRUB's boot menu. Grime allows you to modify the menu colors, import and select a splash image, or hide the menu. It is meant to be used in conjunction with other tools that edit the GRUB menu contents, such as GNOME System Tools or Debian's update-grub, not an all-in-one configuration utility such as grubconf.

grubinstall is a simple program with clear documentation to take the mystery out of the GRUB boot loader. It installs GRUB in an especially simple, robust, hard-to-screw-up form: in a dedicated contiguous boot area at the beginning of the boot disk. This is in contrast to the tools in the GRUB package, which get filesystems involved.

will boot your PC and analyse your filesystems. It will display a graphical menu for you to select which (mostly Linux) system to boot. Intended to replace LILO and Loadlin, written in C with GCC, fully real mode

jinit is based on an extended version of Richard Gooch's need scheme for inits. It has complete service start and stop (rollback) support with dependency tracking. If you stop the network service for example, all network daemon services will also be stopped.

searches all primary partitions of all harddisks available, according to the PC BIOS, for LILO. If LILO is found, it loads and starts it. It only looks in partitions of the type 0x05, 0x0f, 0x83, and 0x85. Type 0x83 means "Linux native", the other types are used for extended partitions

mkinitramfs is intended to create the ultimate initramfs image. It's designed to boot from any media (SATA, PATA, SCSI, USB, CD-ROM, etc.) without any changes being made to your disk. However, it is very simple (about 400 lines of code).

ms-sys is for writing Microsoft compatible boot records. The program does the same as Microsoft "fdisk /mbr" to a hard disk or "sys d:" to a floppy or FAT32 partition except that it does not copy any system files, only the boot record is written.

lets you specify a linux kernel boot parameter and loads the chosen network scheme (+ related services). When logging in, it changes the browser's proxy configuration according to the current network scheme

PXE Knife is a set of utilities modeled after Ultimate Boot CD. It is designed to work with the syslinux boot stacks and was specifically designed for use with PXE (although it's configuration is general enough that it could be used with isolinux or extlinux without issue).

ROCK-Plug aims to replace the original hotplug package and the current hardware detection technology of ROCK Linux, called hwscan. It is designed with the KISS priciple in mind, fitting in the existing ROCK Linux framework. It features both scanning cold-plugged devices (present during bootup) and real hotplug events generated for devices plugged into a running system.

adds synchronisation and integrity-checking to the operating system "service startup" phase, allowing a computer's services to start in parallel. Without parallelism, "service startup" is typically the most time-consuming part of the boot process

Syslinux is a collection of boot loaders for Linux and other operating systems which operates on Linux ext2/ext3 filesystems, MS-DOS FAT filesystems, network servers using PXE firmware, or from CD-ROMs.

a linux system on a bootable cdrom for repairing your system and your data after a crash. It also aims to provide an easy way to carry out admin tasks on your computer, such as creating and editing the partitions of the hard disk

UNetbootin allows for the installation of various Linux/BSD distributions to a partition or USB drive, so it's no different from a standard install, only it doesn't need a CD. It can create a dual-boot install, or replace the existing OS entirely. Read more